top 15 most prestigious universities

College Search & Selection
1001

<p>
[quote]

I don't think I'm being unreasonable here.

[/quote]

rd31, you are not very unreasonable, at least better than Bacchanalia and the like, who don't have a clue on which universities are really the pinnacle of higher education, who kept arguing that only HYP enjoy the national presitige, while Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Caltech are just regional players.</p>

<p>Your beloved Yale is great, super strong in humanities, arts, and law school, excellent in sciences. However Yale is in no way at the level of Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley, which are super strong in almost every fields. Yale is not at MIT's level, because MIT beats Yale in basicaly every field it has.</p>

1002

<p>My top 15 most prestigious universities:
1. MIT
2. Stanford
3. Harvard
4. Princeton
5. Yale
6. Duke
7. Columbia
8. UPenn
9. CalTech
10. Dartmouth
11. Cornell
12. Brown
13. Notre Dame
14. UChicago
15. JHU</p>

1003

<p>svalbardlutefisk,</p>

<p>Those people who agreed with you are mostly from Yale and Duke. It happened that these 2 universities are relatively weak in graduate school rankings, compared to their high ranks in US-NEWS college ranking, which doesn't tell the individual department strength at college level.</p>

<p>I have shown you several times that the quality of departments at graduate level and at undergraduate level are basically the same, as long as a university has both a graduate program and an undergraduate program in a given department. For instance, in business and engineering, MIT and Berkeley both have a super strong graduate program, and at the same time, they both have a super strong undegraduate program. </p>

<p>Yale deserves to be a top 10 university, but not qualified to be a top 4 university. The top 4 are Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT. Yale might be a good candidate for the #5 university in USA. But it needs to compete with Caltech, Princeton, Chicago, Columbia, and Cornell. </p>

<p>Duke is a solid top 20 university. It is in no way a top 10.</p>

1004

<p>hater </p>

<p>10 chars</p>

1005

<p>

You are ridiculous. Yale is easily considered to be in the league for HPS for undergrad (grad its all different since all that really matters is the individual school you attend). Everyone thinks that.....you make an absurd statement with no rationalization remotely. Finally, Berkeley is not a top 4 university, the sheer boosterism of your post is hilarious. Berkeley and MIT are great for engineering and are considered the top for that, but in any other field they are either similarly compared or beaten out by HYPS (which do have great economics, math, science ect...). Also that reference is primarily for MIT, which is at a level that Berkeley is not</p>

<p>Also in the second part of your post you cite some more schools. Pray tell me why Cal Tech a school so narrowly focused deserves to be better than Penn (which you didn't list) or Duke which you said is a top 20 school. Why is it that Princeton, Cornell, and Chicago are better than Penn Dartmouth and Brown.... Princeton is, but Cornell or Chicago, give me a break. Its one thing to assert certain schools are peers, but your arbitrary rankings are delusional and represent your own opinion and not that of society.</p>

1006

<p>Bescraze,</p>

<p>you are delusional by claiming something without any back up evidence.</p>

<p>In US News graduate school ranking, Berkeley is better than Yale in math, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, computer science, psycology, sociology, economics, business school, politics, education, and engineering, tied with yale in Eglish, lost to Yale only in law, history, and medical school. Berkeley beats Yale hands down.</p>

<p>Besides, more than 200 Berkeley faculty members belong to the USA national academies of science, more than 2 times of Yale in this metric. Berkeley professors are simply more distinguished and more famous. </p>

<p>MIT beats Yale in almost all the departments it has. </p>

<p>Caltech beats Yale in most of the departments it has.</p>

<p>Chicago, Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton are all better than Brown and dartmouth in most of the fields. Brown and Dartmouth hardly have a top 10 department in the nation. Penn might belong to the same group as Chicago, Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton. But Penn's science and engineering departments are a notch below. All my claims can be verified by US-NEWS graduate school ranking, which is based on a survey on academic peers, who are the experts in their fields and know more than any random person surfing on this board.</p>

1007

<p>


</p>

<p>Out of curiosity, how exactly do you define undergrad focus and why does undergrad focus matter?</p>

1008

<p>Where does it come into your head datalook that having more superior undergraduate major programs as identified by USNWR means that a certain school is better than another. There is a reason USNWR uses other criteria like endowment, sat scores, selectivity, student to faculty ratio and so on.....so so much more contributes to how good a school is and how prestigious it is than a simple my math is better than yours contest. Thus I did back up my argument, have you?</p>

1009

<p>My top 15:</p>

<p>(tiered)</p>

<p>Harvard</p>

<p>Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Caltech</p>

<p>Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, Chicago</p>

<p>JHU, Nortwestern, Duke, Brown</p>

1010

<p>
[quote]
There is a reason USNWR uses other criteria like endowment, sat scores, selectivity, student to faculty ratio and so on.....so so much more contributes to how good a school is and how prestigious it is than a simple my math is better than yours contest.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>At least there is a method to the madness when you look at datalook's rankings. There is no rationale behind what USNWR does.</p>

1011

<p>To Bescraze and Datalook</p>

<p>your both right, though your comparing data from various different sources. undergrad vs. graduate respectively, you are both right. :)</p>

<p>I do agree with datalook's assessment, he does have credible information to back up his claims.</p>

1012

<p>Datalook, I am fine with your assessment (and I do appreciate your kind words toward Yale), if you are mostly talking about graduate schools. Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford are probably the best graduate schools in the nation/world (although my qualm with MIT is that it really is lacking compared to Yale in Humanities, Fine Arts, Law, and Medicine). </p>

<p>However, for undergraduate, I think most people would agree that Yale is easily a top 5 school, if not a top 3 school. The undergraduate experience is less impacted by graduate departmental rankings than you would think. We're not generally learning graduate level material as undergrads, and the few that are, are still not at such a high level where it makes a difference (especially since Yale is ranked in the top 10 for so many departments). </p>

<p>Yale does have distinguished faculty (a fair number of nobel laureates, Tony Blair, etc.). However, this really is less meaningful than one would think. I had a nobel laureate as one of my molecular biology professors in the spring semester. He was by far the worst "teacher" I've had at Yale. He always explained difficult concepts in round-about, imprecise language. He had difficulty answering the actual questions students asked in class. He was also so absorbed in his own research and held such high self-regard that he was virtually unapproachable after class. I know this isn't always the case, but having distinguished faculty could easily be more of a detriment than an asset to an undergrad.</p>

<p>Also note that Yale's resources are virtually unbeatable (Harvard owns Yale here). We have the second largest library in the nation, the second largest endowment ($22.5 billion), innumerable Yale-sponsored internships (international as well as domestic), and somewhat excessive extracurricular funding (what other top 5 undergrad school has 5 UNDERGRADUATE symphonies?). We also easily have one of the top 3 student bodies in terms of GPA/SAT/Class Rank. Yale has phenomenal grad placement; for example, 94-96% of Yale students applying to medical school get in, compared to 75-85% at peer schools such as Stanford and MIT. The recently released WSJ survey of median incomes also places Yale in the top 4 and above Harvard, I believe (although this study, like many, has its flaws).</p>

<p>Yale's resources also allow lowly freshman to get involved in undergraduate research. There are two programs just for freshmen that I can think of at the top of my head (STARS and Perspectives on Science), that fund around 100 freshmen to perform year-long and summer-long research projects with Yale faculty. We also have courses such as Rainforest Exhibition, where students get funding to travel the world, collect samples, and receive a stipend to perform summer research that is often published (a fair number have co-authored in Nature). </p>

<p>I had the opportunity of researching the origin of neural crest cells my second semester freshman year, with a Cambridge/Caltech grad who has published neurological articles in Nature.</p>

<p>Resources even allow for enriched language study. Yale pays for student fellowships to study languages around the world. Furthermore, if Yale does not offer a particular language a student wants to study, they hire a private tutor for that student to learn their desired language. This is NOT typical for a top 10 undergraduate institution. In comparison, MIT does not even offer Arabic, which I believe is the second most spoken language in the world (between Mandarin and English). </p>

<p>I could go on to really show how Yale is easily a top 5 if not a top 3 undergraduate institution, but I don't feel that I need to. For undergrads on college confidential, we have the acronym HYPSM for a reason.</p>

1013

<p>My top 15:</p>

<p>(tiered)</p>

<p>Harvard</p>

<p>Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, </p>

<p>Columbia, Penn,, Dartmouth, Cal tech, Brown, Duke</p>

<p>JHU, Nortwestern, Cornell, Wash U</p>

1014

<p>My top 15 (Graduate Program Wise)</p>

<p>Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago, Stanford</p>

<p>MIT, Yale, Caltech</p>

<p>Penn, Columbia, Duke, JHU, Northwestern, Cornell</p>

<p>WashU, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown (tell me, Princeton doesn't have a med, biz, law school, only some of those programs of other school have programs in the top ten)</p>

<p>Note this is a grad wise program lol. I'm willing to hear the bashing.</p>

1015

<p>Brownman, see my post #1014 for a good idea of what a solid undergrad school does. Undergrad focus matters because learning does not happen solely in the classroom.</p>

<p>Basically, undergrad focus can be described by student:faculty ratio, class sizes, funding per student, undergraduate resources, extracurricular funding, research opportunities, etc. </p>

<p>The difference between a school like Yale and Berkeley for undergrad really is size and resources. Yale can provide much more for its students because of its endowment and because it has fewer students. Berkeley may have more distinguished faculty, but this is in part due to the fact that Berkeley is enormous and Yale is mid-sized. Additionally, I would rather be taught by a competent science professor in a seminar type setting than by a nobel laureate in a lecture of 300+.</p>

<p>Phead, if we're going by US News, Chicago does not even come ahead of Yale in graduate departmental + professional school rankings.</p>

1016

<p>My top 15 for grad programs:</p>

<p>(tiered)</p>

<p>Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley</p>

<p>Chicago, Cornell, JHU, Yale, Columbia, Caltech, Penn</p>

<p>Princeton (good PhD programs in science), Dartmouth(at least they have Tuck), UIUC(incredible graduate engineering), Carnegie Mellon</p>

1017

<p>


</p>

<p>Haha be careful Brownman, we can't pick and choose from USNWR. Datalook uses USNWR to back up his graduate school rankings, so we should therefore be able to use USNWR to back up our undergraduate school rankings, no?</p>

<p>Also note that for undergrad, Yale beats Princeton and MIT in yield battles. We generally beat Stanford, but this year it was 80-80 (tied). The only undergraduate school that Yale definitively loses to is Harvard. Therefore, for the majority of HYPSM admits, Yale is a top 3 <em>undergraduate</em> school, at least in popularity (and I believe that popularity is rather telling).</p>

<p>I must insist that Yale is top 5, if not top 3, for undergrad.</p>

1018

<p>
[quote]
Haha be careful Brownman, we can't pick and choose from USNWR. Datalook uses USNWR to back up his graduate school rankings, so we should therefore be able to use USNWR to back up our undergraduate school rankings, no?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Obviously both methods are flawed, but there is a rationale behind datalook's thinking (even if it is flawed).</p>

<p>There is absolutely no rationale in USNWR's thinking for undergraduate rankings. They arbitrarily incorporate (rather random) characteristics plug them in a calculator, and this somehow measures undergraduate quality.</p>

1019

<p>Can someone explain to me what exactly it means to have a top department in a program and how it is relevant at the undergrad level? Are these award-winning faculty members better teachers than regular PhDs? Is quality at all correlated with prestige? How come Caltech and Chicago have such top-ranked programs and yet most laymen and a sizable number of intelligent people have never heard of them?</p>

<p>Also, how exactly is the quality of a department measured at a school?</p>

1020

<p>


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<p>I tend to agree with this even more so than my own ranking for graduate schools. Good job.</p>